Archive for the ‘Nature and Wildlife’ Category

Find out more about the HDR-AZ1 here: http://www.sony.co.uk/electronics/act…

On September 28th 2014, for the first time ever, a white-tailed eagle flew over the streets of Paris, soaring from the very top of the Eiffel Tower to the Trocadero Gardens. The white-tailed eagle has been extinct in France for over 50 years, and so to celebrate this momentous flight we decided to use a Sony Action Cam Mini to record the whole thing from a breath-taking point-of-view.

The event was a collaboration with non-profit organisation FREEDOM, whose objective is to re-introduce the white-tailed eagle into its natural habitat in the French and Swiss Alps.

Although one of the largest cities in the world, few who haven’t actually been here realize that Rio de Janeiro grew from the middle of the Tijuca rainforest, since its founding in 1565.

Although the jaguars were extinguished long ago, many other wild animals still call Rio their home and it’s not unusual to see troops of tiny marmoset families walking along neighborhood power lines – or swinging from the trees outside one’s apartment window. (Squirrels are cute but marmosets are cuter!)

I’m very happy to say that I am here with my vast family, in this life-loving city.

The narrator, who some may recognize as the former MTV VJ, “Downtown” Julie Brown, pronounces “Tijuca” like “Ti-HOO-ka as if it were written in Spanish – which is not the language of Brazil and is certainly not how the indigenous Tupi people pronounced it. In phonetic English, it would be “Chee-ZHOO-ka” The “j” being pronounced the same as a French “j”; a consonant that exists in several languages but not in English, except in borrowed words, like “massage.”

It is very difficult to observe walruses: the arctic climate is the first deterrent.

The Australian walrus specialist, Jason Roberts has been living in the far-flung polar archipelago of Spitzbergen (a Norwegian territory) for many years and has been studying walruses and their family hierarchy up close.

He takes us on an expedition to the 80th latitude where we will observe walruses as they feed underwater as it has never been filmed before. We will follow these heavyweights under the ice and will be confronted with one of the rarest sharks – the Greenland shark.

We also get to visit the rarely-viewed Franz Josef Land, another Polar archipelago to the northeast that’s part of Russian territory. Only scientists are allowed and the mostly-abandoned camp speaks to lack of financing. Roberts’ crew is welcomed by a crashed transport plane to join French and Russian scientists, who improvise with the local ruins to make for a habitable camp for their studies.

Off the southern tip of Africa, contrasting ocean currents create one of the most dramatic and diverse marine ecosystems in the world – which also have massive impacts on the terrestrial ecosystems.

Here, giants of the deep roam alongside brightly colored coral dwellers, and the wonders of the ocean come to life, where the icy South Atlantic collides with the reopical waters of the Indian Ocean, shown here.

I’ve been told that the unspoiled coast of Mozambique is one of the most beautiful places in the world. I hope I get to see it one day.

SciShow takes you down the deepest hole in the world – Russia’s Kola Superdeep Borehole – explaining who dug it and why, and

what we learned about Earth in the process, such as the layers of water, created out of super high-pressures, from the hydrogen and oxygen squeezed out of the surrounding rock strata, a phenomenon never before observed; also found were single-celled

animals, found not in the customary limestone deposits of former oceans but likely preserved, due to the extraordinarily high pressures.

By the time the geologists got to the 12-km-deep (7.45 miles) area, where the rock dated 2.7 nillion years old, the temperatures down there were extremely hot – 180 degrees Celcius/356 Fahrenheit and the “rock,” at that depth, according to the geologists, behaved more like “plastic.”

Buried deep beneath the Antarctic ice lies Lake Whillans. Despite being one of the most inhospitable places on Earth, Lake Whillans was nevertheless thought to contain life. In early 2014 a team of scientists trekked across the ice, tasked with drilling 800 metres down to the lake and looking for life. Reporter Douglas Fox went with them, and he tells us about his experiences.

Read Douglas’ feature: http://www.nature.com/news/lakes-unde…

Read the scientists’ research paper: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature13667

Around 400 million years ago, fish left the water and started to evolve into land-loving creatures. But how did the transition happen? A new and unusual experiment could shed some light on the kinds of changes that enabled fins to become limbs. Researchers took a fish species known to be able to walk on its fins from time to time, and raised it on land. Watch the fish promenade in this Nature Video.

Superclusters are regions of space that are densely packed with galaxies and they’re the biggest structures in the Universe.

But scientists have struggled to define exactly where one supercluster ends and another begins. Now, a team based in Hawaii has come up with a new technique that maps the Universe according to the flow of galaxies across space. Redrawing the boundaries of the cosmic map, they redefine our home supercluster and named it Laniakea, which means “immeasurable heaven” in Hawaiian.

This time-lapse footage was filmed by professional photographer, Terje Sorgjerd over the course of 7 days atop and around El Teide, Spain’s highest mountain, which is actually a volcano on the Island of Tenerife in the Canary Island Chain.

El Teide is also the highest point above sea level in the Atlantic Ocean and is renowned as one of the best places in the world to photograph stars. I have to say, having seen a LOT of this stuff, this is the best footage of the Milky Way, and some of the most interesting tidal cloud phenomena taken from the ground that I’ve seen.

I’d like to hope that the appearance of so much pristine and unique nature, still to be enjoyed on the Canary Islands’ most populous island and biggest tourist destination is not an illusion.

Make sure your sound is on, and activate full-screen HD for the full experience.